
If you’ve ever moved into a new home, then you know how difficult it can be to steer bulky furniture through narrow hallways or around awkward corners. Mathematicians have been trying to solve this problem, too, ever since 1966, when Leo Moser framed it in quantitative terms. Say you want to move a two-dimensional shape — your sofa (disregarding its height) — through an L-shaped hallway.
Source If you’ve ever moved into a new home, then you know how difficult it can be to steer bulky ...

Starting with my first Raspberry Pi project with the Recovery Kit in 2019, I often hear feedback of how expensive the Pelican case is globally. While I really like the Pelican 1300 and 1150 cases, they are often subject to import and export duties and taxes, and while they started out around $40 a few years ago, some of them are $80+ domestically, and from what I hear, as close to $200 overseas. I've been toying with the idea of doing a case in CAD, but let me be clear- the designs I am sharing...

LLMs struggle with large amounts of context. Bharani
Subramaniam and I explain how to mitigate this common RAG
problem with a Reranker which takes the document
fragments from the retriever, and ranks them according to their usefulness.
more…
LLMs struggle with large amounts of context. Bharani
Subramaniam and I explain how to mitigate this common RAG
problem with a Reranker which takes the document
fragments from the retriever, and ranks them ...

I’m sitting on the couch. 30 minutes ago I finished an episode of Broadchurch and was getting up to do the last little puttering around things before bed. Then Lily came in and asked me to quiz her for a Spanish test. So we went over the alphabet and the days of the week and numbers up to 30 and some basic questions like Como te llama Y de donde eres y cuantos años tienes.
Then she wanted to look up the Spanish alphabet video they used in class so we did and then followed a little YouTub...
Bringing Foam Monsters to Life: How I Wrote and Illustrated a Children's Book Using AI
simplyexplained.com
I've always wanted to write a book. It's been on my bucket list for several years, but I never got around to it. Last summer I had a revelation: my kids love being read to, so why don't I write a story for them?Here's how I approached writing a children's book and how I used AI to illustrate it.
I've always wanted to write a book. It's been on my bucket list for several years, but I never got around to it. Last summer I had a revelation: my kids lov...
Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable”
(though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the
variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for
expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. I’m making this page to catalog
the papers I have found interesting and leave a couple of comments on them.
A brief bit of background
It comes from the 1980s. Wikipedia claims the first paper about it (though not
by the na...
Build Box64 with Box32 for X86 emulation on RISC-V Linux
Recently I've been testing a SiFive HiFive Premier P550 , and as part of that testing, I of course plugged in some AMD GPUs I had laying around.
I'll get to that testing at a later date, but one thing I enjoy in my testing is finding what 3D accelerated games and other applications can be run on alternative architectures. With the great work from Wine and Proton over the years, a great many games run out of the box ...
Python: Dependency injection for cleaner I/O handling
stfn.pl
A way to handle I/O calls that makes code cleaner and testing easier A way to handle I/O calls that makes code cleaner and testing easier

I know I’m a bit silly here on occasion, even when discussing technical topics. But I want to be serious here for a moment, if you’ll indulge me.
Writing this blog almost every day for twenty years has been one of the great joys of my life. It’s not as impressive as the creative outlets of, say, an artist or a musician, but it feels natural and fun to do. I love researching topics, sharing fun things I’ve found, walking you through how I’ve fixed a problem, and on occasion expressing...
Hey all, quick post today to mention that I added tracing support to the
Whippet GC library . If the support
library for LTTng is available when Whippet is
compiled, Whippet embedders can visualize the GC process. Like this! Click above for a full-scale screenshot of the
Perfetto trace explorer processing the
nboyer
microbenchmark
with the parallel copying collector on a 2.5x heap. Of course no image
will have all the information; the nice thing about trace visualizers
like is that ...

This evening I spotted an obscure bug in Datasette , using Datasette Lite . I figure it's a good opportunity to highlight how useful it is to have a URL-addressable Python environment, powered by Pyodide and WebAssembly.
Here's the page that helped me discover the bug:
https://lite.datasette.io/?install=datasette-visible-internal-db&ref=1.0a17#/_internal/catalog_columns?_facet=database_name
To explain what's going on here, let's first review the individual components.
Datasette ...
0051: hytradboi program and tickets, query compilers, decorrelation encore, books, misc 0051: hytradboi program and tickets, query compilers, decorrelation encore, books, misc 0051: hytradboi program and tickets, query compilers, decorrelation encore, books, misc

The 2024 Monster Manual is out, so we can finally answer all the questions we have: are 2024 Monster Manual monsters tougher than 2014 monsters? How much? How does WOTC design 2024-compatible monsters, and how can I do the same for my home games and publishing projects?
It’s up to us to answer these questions, because WOTC doesn’t do so. In the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide, WOTC offered charts that listed a monster’s base statistics by Challenge Rating. According to my analysis those DM...

The time I Broke my High School Mail Server
For 3 days in 2006, nobody at my high school could turn in homework because of my dumb joke. It's a fun story, and thinking about it leaves my grateful for the great adults in my life. So I thought I would write it down.
Read the full post on my blog!
Here's a raw link, if you need it:
https://eieio.games/blog/breaking-my-highschool-mail-server
The time I Broke my High School Mail Server
For 3 days in 2006, nobody at my high school cou...
Critical scientific documents go missing from NASA-backed lunar community website
jatan.space
Screenshot of the inaccessible document archive on LEAG’s website as of February 10, 2025. A whole host of documents presenting work and recommendations of US scientists and engineers in service of NASA’s Moon exploration goals have gone missing from the website of the agency-backed Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (LEAG). The missing documents include but is not limited to the key 2023 CLOC-SAT report by US lunar experts, which urged NASA to plan a replacement for the 2009-lau...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter, where we feature desk tours with makers and creators. Name: Kalok Yeung Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands Occupation: Creative Director/Digital Designer Room size: 12 m² (129 ft²) Cost of setup: ~$8K Social media: Instagram , Twitter Website: Kalok Yeung Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself I’m a creative director and digital designer based in Amsterdam, working globally. Technology has always been at the core of ...

Ruben wrote a response to a thread on MetaFilter inviting readers to write a response with the prompt “Do you have a small something good to share?”. This prompt was inspired by a student of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who held up a sign with the words “ Tell us something good that happened to you today .”
When I saw this prompt, I thought “I should respond!”
Here are a few things on my mind:
I have had two delicious cups of coffee today.
I received a h...
This is the 77th edition of People and Blogs , the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Max Kapur and his blog, maxkapur.com
To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter . A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed .
If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consid...
How to add a directory to your PATH
jvns.caI was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s
something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a
long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually
couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot of them just
said “add this to ~/.bashrc ”, but what if you’re not using bash? What if your
bash config is actually in a different file? And how are you supposed to figure
out which ...

The Orbital Index
Issue No. 305 | Feb 12, 2025
🚀 🌍 🛰
...
A student asked me if complexity research was easier when I was a student. Interesting question. Let's compare research now versus the late 80's. The big advantage today is technology. Just a small sampling below. Information : Google, Wikipedia, Complexity Zoo and the ever more powerful AI systems Online Papers : arXiv, digital libraries, individual's web sites Collaboration : Zoom, Overleaf, Theory Stack Exchange Communication: Social Media, Online Talks and Classes, YouTube, Mobile Phones Ba...

I got enough positive interest in some variety of book club that I would like to move forward with that. I want to discuss Feedback Control for Computer Systems: Introducing Control Theory to Enterprise Programmers . A couple people expressed interest in discussing the query optimization book but also rightly pointed out that the ongoing CMU course somewhat obviates having a parallel discussion track. Maybe it's something we can do in the future.
I have put logistical information and a link...

Last week, prominent designer Anthony Hobday asked ChatGPT:
It responded:
While ChatGPT came up with the perfect answer to Anthony’s question (ha!), I don’t rate most of its design advice.
For example, I asked ChatGPT a relatively simple design question:
How do you add hint text to radio buttons?
And it made these suggestions:
Suggestion #1: “If you want the hint to appear when the user hovers on the radio button, use a tooltip for a cleaner design”
‘If ...